There are amenities of the future that X misses — music, most of all — but otherwise he feels little sense of loss. Halfway in his voyage, at the longitude of thirty-three and a third, he wanders the decks of the ship, mulling how whatever chance he ever had of becoming a great novelist in the Nineties now is gone, when the epiphany hits him.
He stares at the paperback and rushes back to his cabin where, at a small table before the porthole, he begins to copy the words in his own hand (oh yes, definitely his own hand). When the ship’s captain lends him a typewriter, X calculates that if he copies even just five pages a day, he’ll finish by the fall, more than two years before the book is published.